The inspiration for the Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Colin Firth, this brilliant late novel from Christopher Isherwood was deemed by Edmund White to be "one of the first and best novels of the modern Gay Liberation movement." Set in 1962, it is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity yet also with humor, Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. Born in Cheshire in 1904, Isherwood began writing in 1928 and left England to live openly as a gay man in the demimonde of Weimar Berlin, where he was inspired to create some of his most famous fiction—stories that would later become wildly popular in the Broadway play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret.

"A quarter-century ahead of its time in its portrayal of a quotidian homosexual life, it inspired a generation of gay writers in Britain and the U.S."—Independent